Billions Shop Online, Yet Under 20 Million Invest: How Groww Bet Four Years of Zero Revenue to Win India's Market

Source: Y Combinator | Published: 2026-06-15T12:30:28Z

Groww spent four full years earning nothing, offering only zero-commission mutual funds and growing purely on word of mouth — then flipped the switch to stock trading when demand naturally emerged, becoming India's largest investment platform and going public.

The Robo-Advisor's Failure Was the Real Starting Point

Groww's first product was a robo-advisor — in 2016, Wealthfront and Betterment were riding high in the U.S., and transplanting the model to India seemed like an obvious play. It didn't work. Users kept asking: Why this product? Why not that one? They didn't want a machine making decisions for them. They wanted a platform where they could see every option and decide for themselves.

Keshre connected this signal to what he'd learned at Flipkart: Indian consumers care about two things — choice and transparency. So in May 2017, the team launched a completely new Groww: every product visible, fully transparent, with a frictionless payment flow. They figured 100 users in the first month would be a win. They got 600.

Users Don't Hand You the Answer — But It's Hidden Between the Lines

Keshre hammers this point repeatedly: don't build what users tell you to build — decode what they're not saying. No user will say "please show all products and provide transparency." But when you piece together their complaints in WhatsApp groups, their questions on Quora, even casual conversations outside movie theaters, the real need emerges.

When the team had only twenty or thirty users, they created dozens of WhatsApp groups. The founders personally answered questions on Quora. They even approached strangers outside cinemas to chat about investing. Every new sign-up got pulled into a private group with direct founder access. These "unscalable" tactics were precisely what helped them make the critical product decisions.

Four Years of Zero Revenue: A Bet With Only One Question Mark Left

Groww made a bold choice. Early on, they earned small commissions distributing regular mutual funds. But the most active, most evangelical users in their WhatsApp groups started asking: why not offer zero-commission direct funds?

The team faced a dilemma: going zero-commission meant zero revenue. But Keshre's reasoning was straightforward — if a product has near-zero acquisition costs, extremely high retention, deeply engaged users moving significant capital through the platform, it's hard for it not to make money eventually. So Groww ran on zero revenue for four full years, until user demand naturally extended to stock trading and the monetization model opened up.

"In a startup, there will always be multiple question marks. If you can reduce them to just one, you're de-risking the business."

This framework is especially relevant for consumer businesses: if all the question marks have disappeared, you're probably not making a real consumer bet.

Growth Has Been Nearly 100% Word-of-Mouth — And Still Is

Groww's early growth came almost entirely from organic referrals — friends telling friends, cousins telling cousins, young people onboarding their parents. Keshre says even today, with millions of users, the majority of growth remains organic.

This isn't a spend-to-acquire-then-figure-out-retention model. The product itself became the growth engine. When your NPS hits a certain threshold, your users become your sales team.

Only Operate Within Regulated Territory

India's financial market has regulated zones, gray areas, and completely unregulated spaces. From day one, Groww made a strategic choice: operate only in regulated territory and get every license by the book.

Keshre's logic: in the early days, make a few deeply committed choices to reduce variables. Fewer variables mean simpler decisions and cleaner execution. In a market where regulations shift constantly, this choice spared them the policy risks that later blindsided many companies operating in gray areas.

Two Hours Using the Product, Two Hours Talking to Users — Every Day

Groww has ten internal tenets, one of which is "obsess over design." But Keshre believes something matters more than any quality framework: founders must be power users of their own product. He spends over two hours a day using Groww, then another two hours talking to users — especially the most demanding power users.

His metric for whether a new feature is working: after launch, he should get two types of messages — "This is amazing, I love it" or "This is terrible, I hate it." Either is fine. The scariest response is indifference, because that means users don't care about what you built.

AI Makes "One Person = One Team" Possible

Keshre is a heavy user of Claude Code. He says launching an internet product used to require three engineers, a product manager, a designer, an ops person, a business development lead — a dozen people minimum. Now a single person who's figured out what to build can handle design, product management, coding, and ops automation themselves.

"Figuring out what to build still requires your own thinking. But the how — that's gotten dramatically easier."

Understanding customer needs hasn't changed, and AI can't replace that. But once you know what to build, the distance from idea to product has been massively compressed.

The Four Co-Founders' Survival Code: Values in Pen, Strategy in Pencil

Four co-founders staying together long-term is remarkably rare in startups. Keshre says three things made it work. First, early on, all four sat down and wrote an exhaustive document laying out their values — starting with "always put the customer first." Values are written in pen — non-negotiable. Strategy is written in pencil — adjustable anytime. As long as values are aligned, decision conflicts over the next ten or twenty years stay minimal.

Second, clear ownership. Early on, everyone did everything — the technical co-founder handled customer support, the finance-background co-founder wrote code, and they all shot a bunch of "extremely rough" early videos — but key decisions always had a single owner.

Third, you have to genuinely enjoy being around these people. Keshre says weekends are the only time they're not physically together, but the WhatsApp group never goes quiet. On Monday morning, you still look forward to seeing them at the office — even through the constant ups and downs of startup life. That's what the ideal co-founder relationship looks like.

"I Can't Think of a Single Sacrifice I've Made"

Someone asked Keshre what he'd sacrificed over ten years of building Groww. He thought about it and said he genuinely couldn't think of anything. There were low points, sure, but the whole journey has been fun.

His advice for young founders boils down to two things. First, don't listen to "veterans" like him, because the world changes too fast — a veteran's experience comes from a context that no longer exists. Second — despite just telling you not to take advice — go do something that makes you lose track of time. Time should dissolve into a single unbroken stretch, and you should be completely immersed in it.